Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists

I just saw this thread and clearly it's been going on a long time. I haven't read through it. I'm just wondering what the "anti" conspiracy folks say about Julius Caesar and Abe Lincoln. Do they think that Caesar was killed by a lone knifeman? Are they aware the US federal government brought conspiracy charges against many people and hanged several of them?

Let me toss out a couple of other datapoints. In 1964 when Lyndon Johnson said that a US navy ship was attacked by North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, if an informed citizen said "Bullshit," would they have been called a conspiracy theorist? Yet we know now that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. It was bullshit. A lie for the purpose of drawing the country in to a larger and totally disastrous war.

Likewise Saddam's WMD's. In fact the US government has lied the country into war many times. So if a person instinctively disbelieves anything the government says, are they a tinfoil hat loony? Or simply a well-informed skeptic with a sharp bullshit detector?

As I mentioned I'm sorry I couldn't have tossed out these questions much earlier in this thread. To me it's people who simply believe everything the government says, without running it through their own common sense, that are the ones who need to be questioned. The government lies to us constantly. Aren't we legitimately entitled to be skeptical, simply by the weight of history?

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I just saw this thread and clearly it's been going on a long time. I haven't read through it. I'm just wondering what the "anti" conspiracy folks say about Julius Caesar and Abe Lincoln. Do they think that Caesar was killed by a lone knifeman? Are they aware the US federal government brought conspiracy charges against many people and hanged several of them?

Let me toss out a couple of other datapoints. In 1964 when Lyndon Johnson said that a US navy ship was attacked by North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, if an informed citizen said "Bullshit," would they have been called a conspiracy theorist? Yet we know now that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. It was bullshit. A lie for the purpose of drawing the country in to a larger and totally disastrous war.

Likewise Saddam's WMD's. In fact the US government has lied the country into war many times. So if a person instinctively disbelieves anything the government says, are they a tinfoil hat loony? Or simply a well-informed skeptic with a sharp bullshit detector?

As I mentioned I'm sorry I couldn't have tossed out these questions much earlier in this thread. To me it's people who simply believe everything the government says, without running it through their own common sense, that are the ones who need to be questioned. The government lies to us constantly. Aren't we legitimately entitled to be skeptical, simply by the weight of history?

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Conspiracies certainly do exist and have existed. But as you mention common sense, please tell me how literally thousands of people, the Russians in the cold war, could ever hoped to be fooled re the Moon landings. To believe that is a conspiracy is certainly to open one's self to be called a loonie.
Please tell me how anyone in their right mine could accept that 9/11 was a conspiracy, when again, thousands of people occupied the two towers and needed to be silenced, plus the passengers on the planes, the planting of the thermite in the buildings somehow, etc etc etc Again to believe that is to be open to being a certified loonie.

No, conspiracy pushers are evil, warped minded individuals, that like trolls on science forums, get there rocks off by spreading disinformation, claiming other nonsensical facts, and then relying on the impressionables, the gullibles, and those that are attracted to woo and spooky stuff to lap it up without giving it a single common sense thought.

The crux of it all though is that history will see the truth prevail, while the mystical conspiracy nonsense will die away to be forever forgotten.

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Please tell me how anyone in their right mine could accept that 9/11 was a conspiracy,

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19 > 1. You remember, "19 Arab hijackers because they hate our freedoms." Nineteen is more than one. The government's own story on 9/11 is a conspiracy theory.

With JFK at least there is a lone gunman theory. One can believe in a lone gunman or one can believe in conspiracy. [The majority of US citizens and the US Congress believe it was a conspiracy].

But with 9/11, you have no choice unless you think that Dick Cheney personally flew all the planes. Every conceivable theory of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory.

Care to rephrase your question? Are you defending the government's conspiracy theory? Then say that. We can discuss it. Even the commission's co-chairs Keane and Hamilton stated publicly that the commission was set up to fail. But maybe you believe their underfunded and implausible account. That's your right. But it's a conspiracy theory.

Every possible explanation or theory or idea about 9/11 must necessarily be a conspiracy theory, because many people must have been involved.

This is a key point, because the phrase "conspiracy theory" is designed to make people turn off their critical thinking facilities. If the very co-chairs of the government's 9/11 commission stated (as they did) that the commission was set up to fail, does that make them tinfoil hatters?

The conspiracy as you well know is the "making up", and creating alternative suggestions, based on isolated primitive so called evidence, as opposed to the overall bulk of empirical evidence and the plot as generally accepted. eg: nineteen terrorists in three planes after 2 or 3 years planning, crashed into the two world towers and the Pentagon, because of the general intent and goal of Al Qaeda. Anything else is a dumb, silly unsupported conspiracy and totally against available evidence.

I'm a bit hazy on your haziness. A conspiracy is a plot involving more than one person to do something. If the government says there were 19 hijackers, that's a conspiracy.

How would 19 people conspiring to do something not be a conspiracy?

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Generalized definition aside, it is usually understood that acts of war by known enemies are not normally called conspiracies. A 9/11 conspiracy is generally understood by all to mean conspiracy among those whom we normally trust - i.e. our own people.

While I get the pedantry, why don't we move ahead with you implicitly applying that definition. It will remove a lot of semantic equivocation.

Generalized definition aside, it is usually understood that acts of war by known enemies are not normally called conspiracies. A 9/11 conspiracy is generally understood by all to mean conspiracy among those whom we normally trust - i.e. our own people.

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But it was only declared an act of war after the fact. Every prior act of terrorism in the US had been investigated as a crime. 9/11 was declared an act of war and not a crime by the Bush administration. Even if one accepts the most mainstream core of the 9/11 attacks -- which you outlined with perfect clarity -- one can still note that the government's reaction to it was driven by an agenda. The Neocon document Project for a New American Century had called for a "new Pearl Harbor" to motivate the American people to support a total transformation of the Middle East. That would be accomplished via a series of wars against seven countries within five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan & Iran. This plan was made several years before 9/11. Many of the key PNAC authors obtained jobs in the Bush administration. We are at war today in every one of those countries and the government can't wait to attack Iran.

Moreover, by not treating 9/11 as a crime, no criminal investigation was done. The debris from the twin towers was hauled off and sold to China for scrap within weeks of 9/11. No forensic examination was allowed or ever took place. Even at the time many New Yorkers howled in anger, from people on the street to newpaper columnists and politicans. Never mind. The deal was done.

Now for the record I do note that this does not in itself make 9/11 a conspiracy beyond the so-called 19 perpetrators. The Neocons just got lucky. If you believe that I'll stipulate it for sake of discussion. But when you look at the endless wars we're in, the trillions of dollars wasted, the utter failure of the Neocon project, the consequences of which we probably haven't even seen yet. In other words the ME is going to get a lot worse because of the PNAC theory and the Bush administration execution of that awful plan.

Now if you're Columbo, you look at cui bono, who benefits.

But if you just declare a crime to be an act of war, Columbo doesn't show up. The evidence is sealed off and shipped to China. Nobody follows the money. The Narrative is decided on first and all evidence not supporting the Narrative is ignored.

This is what happened with the 9/11 commission.

Now I can hold two things: (1) 9/11 happened exactly as the commission says it did; and (2) the commission still did a really shoddy job and their work does not meet the standard of what I would call rational inquiry.

But once you see the ugly truth about (2), you start to question (1). And that's where I'm at.

While I get the pedantry, why don't we move ahead with you implicitly applying that definition. It will remove a lot of semantic equivocation.

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No I utterly reject your claim that because the Bush administration decided that this was their new Pearl Harbor so they could put into place their maniac wars; that they deliberately called 9/11 an act of war, instead of what it was: a crime. A crime with perpetrators, planners, financiers, enablers, suppliers, and all the rest of the vast -- CONSPIRACY -- that must have supported the operations.

But instead of looking for ANY of that, the government sent the country off to war and UTTERLY FAILED to do a criminal investigation.

9/11 was obviously a conspiracy. Of the 19, yes. And of everyone else who enabled and supported it. It was also a crime, but never investigated as such.

That you think it's so obviously a war means that the government's brainwashing has been very effective.

If you can step back from that ... see 9/11 at the moment it happened, neither a crime nor a war until someone labelled it as such -- someone with a big time agenda -- you'd see that your own opinion is not really yours. You heard a lie over and over and over till it became the truth. It was Pearl Harbor. An attack on America.

The Pearl Harbor narrative had been decided on several years before. And the wars, every war the Neocons wanted. .

9/11 was a crime. An and a conspiracy. It was the coordinated action of hundreds of people scattered all over the world, some in the US surely, many in Saudi Arabia as the government finally was forced to admit just in 2016.

So no, I reject your characterization. I've laid out the conspiracy. 19 plus elements of the government of Saudi Arabia and enablers and financiers unknown. That's your conspiracy.

conspiracies are a constant in life because people are so fallible.
i'm suspicious of people who are unsuspicious or unaware of the prevalence of conspiracies. it is either they are naive or they are actual participants or perpetrators themselves, trying to make everyone around them think all is as it seems.

strange that scientists won't or can't stop any of these things. now how rational and logical is the universe again? which part?

i'm concluding that lifeforms are inherently nuts and gross and that in the future, probably robots and supercomputers that people are afraid will take over and make people obsolete may end up deserving that position.

how can you really stop it when people procreate and produce more people into society who do this in the next generation after generation?

either you fix the core genetics itself (oops, god's perfect creation or darwinian evolution?) because of these faults or pure technology based lifeforms take humanity's place.

because this sure isn't any definition of positive evolution. it's called a mess. this is the problem with technology serving the disgusting and base desires of lifeforms by keeping them alive, extending their lives, adding to their comfort etc for what? for lifeforms to continue to do what? keep predating on eachother for amusement? there is no good point to it.

My view on conspiracy theorists is perfectly encapsulated by the behaviour of Fatfreddy88.

If you ignore the incessant and appalling spamming and repetition, he pretty much does the sane things over and over. When he is banned or threads closed he takes his Gollum victory dance and calls everyone paid shills.

So apparently this IS a disinfo forum and every one who takes the time to respond to his bullshit is a paid sophists or shill.

Oh, so you accept the lies of modern so-called "scientists?" There is PROOF that you can't measure the Earth's curvature in most places. And if there's PROOF then it can't be round! But round-earthers want to keep making billions from a government who wants you to think that the Earth is round. Why are you such a sheep?

Heck, there's more proof for a flat Earth than for the claim that we didn't go to the moon. Here are Youtube videos that prove it, and we all know they are as authoritative as it gets:

Why are you so selective on the lies you believe? Why not be less bigoted, and just accept all lies? That's the only way to be TRULY open minded.

If you look at a conspiracy theory one thing stands out, blame. There's always SOMEONE at fault and a cover-up is in place to protect that person or group. When an airliner blew up off New York years back most people wondered how it happened. A special subsection of the public wondered why it happened and who stood to gain from that. It is this feature that makes conspiracy advocates immune to facts and fatal flaws in their theories. They're out to attack someone, not to gain a better understanding of the events.